Oxus

Published on 5th February, 2023, in Mid-day. No conversation about Harappans and Aryans is now complete without discussing the Oxus civilisation. Cities of the Oxus civilisation, in what is now Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, traded with cities of the Harappan civilisation to their south, until Harappan cities ceased to exist by 1900 BCE. They also had close ties with pastoralists in the north, in what is now South Russia and Kazakhstan, who had successfully domesticated horses and harnessed them to chariots around 2000 BCE. These horse-domesticating Steppe herdsmen eventually moved south, lived in Oxus basin for a few generations, and eventually split into two groups, the ..